SLENDER MAN (PG-13)
Released by Sony Pictures
Review by Adam Mast
There’s a reason why SLENDER MAN has been sitting on the shelf for a while. It’s because it isn’t very good. Particularly when viewed in a year that’s seen impressive genre efforts like HEREDITARY, A QUIET PLACE, and THE RITUAL making the rounds. By contrast, this movie is pretty uneventful, but more importantly, it isn’t particularly scary.
SLENDER MAN takes its cue from a supernatural character that was introduced on the internet around a decade ago and finds a group of Massachusetts-based pals awakening a supernatural force online all while setting out to disprove its existence in the first place. This evil presence materializes in the form of a faceless, abnormally tall being called the Slender Man. After conjuring up this pesky creature, these teenage pals are forced to deal with the horrific consequences.
It would be difficult to name all of this film’s many influences because there are just too damn many of them. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, IT, THE BABADOOK, EVIL DEAD, and THE GUARDIAN, just to name a few. In the end, though, it’s all about the execution. Storytellers often borrow from the cinematic treasures that inspired them but it’s ultimately up to these storytellers to breathe new life into familiar tropes and for the most part, the team behind SLENDER MAN are unable to do that. This is a pretty lifeless affair. The mythology behind the title character is uninspired, to say the least, and it doesn’t help matters that the editing is clunky to the point that some scenes have no sense of rhythm at all. It should also be noted that a great deal of this picture is poorly lit.
What’s more, this is one of those horror films that resorts to loud noises and obnoxious music cues in an effort to scare you, and the end result is generally headache inducing. Some of this stuff could have been forgiven if we would have been treated to a cinematic boogeyman truly worth fearing, alas the visual effects used to bring the title character to life are less than stellar making for another squandered opportunity in a film full of squandered opportunities.
Director Sylvain White does get some mileage out his effective locales, particularly the home of his lead teenage protagonist and the Massachusetts woods where a lot of the action takes place. He also stages a fairly creepy sequence in which a potential victim views sinister pov playback on a cell phone. In the end, though, none of this really adds up to much. There’s simply a lack of energy here and the Slender Man mythology itself feels like a tired cliche. The idea that the Slender Man could infect minds like a virus infects a computer is an interesting one but it isn’t interesting as presented in this film.
A shame that SLENDER MAN ends up being such a dud because the internet is a prime target for the horror genre. Even with their flaws, the UNFRIENDED movies tapped into this notion but it should also be noted that the UNFRIENDED movies have a stronger sense of identity. SLENDER MAN just sort of lumbers along from one tedious, uninspired scene to the next reminding us of all the stronger horror movies that clearly inspired it. It wants us to fear that urban legend we stumble across while surfing the web, but it never really gives us a reason to truly be scared.
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